The second most important decision that you are going to take is about either using a free blog hosting provider or registering a domain for your blog, use a freely available blogging software and host it on a shared hosting account. There has been a lot of debate in the past about it not making any difference whichever blogging platform you choose. From our experience, we found that if it is only about making money from your blog, it doesn’t matter which blogging platform you choose. You can make the same amount of money from your blog by using either free or your own hosted platform. Having said that, there are quite a few factors about blogging using either of the platforms that you should keep in mind before you decide which platform you want to go with.
Shown below is a table that highlights the most important differences between the two major blogging platforms, Blogger (free) and WordPress (your blog hosted on your own domain name).
| Feature | Free blogging platform such as Blogger | Self hosted platform such as WordPress | Which is better? |
| Initial setup | It’s very easy to setup a blog using Blogger. All you have to do is select a name of your blog and create a free account. | You need to register a domain name that will cost you $10 per annum. Then sign up for a hosting account which may cost you $5-$7 per month. After which you will have to download the software and setup on the server. | Blogger is better in this category since the initial setup is so easy that anyone can get started in minutes. Wordpress setup is both time consuming and requires initial investment. |
| Themes and customization – Look and feel of your blog | There are quite a lot of free Blogger templates that you can use but customizing them to your needs could be difficult. It’s not so easy to modify each and every aspect of your template. | There are thousands of freely available WordPress templates that you can download and customize to any extent. You need technical know-how to be able to do that. | WordPress is a clear winner in this category as you can choose from thousands of templates and easily customize them to your needs. |
| Writing content in your blog (writing posts/articles) | Writing content is easy in Blogger | Writing content is easy in WordPress too! | Both are equally good in this category. However, WordPress has a slight edge over Blogger because of its WYSIWYG editor that can be customized. |
| Image storage | Blogger limits storage of images to 1GB. | It depends on how much space your hosting account has. | WordPress is better since it has an image browser built-in. |
| Static pages | This feature is not available in Blogger. You can’t have standalone pages such as ‘About Us’ or ‘Contact me’. | Create unlimited number of pages in WordPress and give custom names to each of them, | WordPress is a clear winner in this category. |
| Team blog | There are only two types of users in Blogger. Administrator and non-administrator user account. | WordPress has many user roles such as Administrator, Editors, Authors and Contributors. | WordPress is a winner in this category. |
| Comments on posts | Blogger allows for moderation options of comments but no editing options. Also, there is no built-in anti-spam protection. | WordPress allows moderation and editing of comments. Akismet offers free anti-spam protection for comments. | WordPress is a clear winner in this category. |
Conclusion: If you are not serious about blogging and just want to get a feel of it, we recommend that you start with a free blog on Blogger.
But, if you want to have your own identity on the Internet, customize every aspect of your blog, aim at becoming a full time professional blogger then we highly recommend of registering a domain name for your blog and use a shared hosting account to host it yourself. The advantages of hosting your blog on your own domain are numerous and presents a lot of opportunities for you to make money on Internet. Check out the blog hosting page for our list of recommended web hosting providers whom we have tried and trust them to provide quality hosting services.